In my blog I share my learning curve about the 'new social learning'. I started with a focus on communities of practice, but there are many new forms of social learning emerging. I share personal experiences, articles and cases

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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Knowledge management: the typical mom

On the beach, my daughters thought of a nice game; in turns, they were making drawings of 'typical mama' , 'typical grandpa', etc. - including themselves. After that the others had to guess. It was really an exercise which gives some feedback. Besides what I expected (mom behind the computer), there was a typical mom who doesn't want to read to them in the early morning and prefers to sleep. And talks to Sil like she is 2 years old (though she is 5)...

Never knew that. It reminded me of the catch phrase that we learn from our mistakes. Often when someone makes an obvious mistake eg sending a mail to the wrong address and it bounces, we do learn from this mistake and correct the mail address. But I wonder if we really learn from our mistakes. Most of the 'mistakes' are not outright mistakes, but rather imperfect actions, are not so obvious and we may never get the feedback to know the effect of our actions. Or the effect takes place much later. Or the people affected do not tell you how they feel (for instance because they are subordinates, or do not want to hurt you). So to enhance learning from mistakes it is crucial to increase the various feedback mechanisms and channels, not only formal anomymous evaluations, but short evaluations, informal checking, sensing or asking for feedback outrightly.